New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson

I read New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson because it filled a Pop Sugar Reading Challenge prompt. Is that a good enough reason? I guess we'll see. I listened to the audiobook, which was a full cast recording with nine narrators.  

In the year 2140, New York, along with most other coastal cities around the world, is under water. But New Yorkers are gonna stay in New York, so the residents adapted. Streets became canals. People get around using water taxis. We follow the residents of the Met Life Tower as they try to halt a hostile takeover over their cooperatively run building and solve a kidnapping. 

Look, I wanted this book to be something it wasn't. It was just a sort of boring mystery set in a cool setting. If the setting had played a larger role in the mystery (it boils down to corrupt politicians - like that couldn't be the case in 2026?) I might have liked it more. But the male POVs were very caveman and the women were Mary Sues. I just...can't. 

ALSO. Let's get to my my critique. This book posits that a couple of tween boys were able to recover a lost 1780 shipwreck in a single dive.  A shipwreck that is buried beneath the landfill of the Bronx. I rolled my eyes so hard in the back of my head. USING A DIVING BELL. I read books about dragons, I think Nancy Drew really does know everybody in River Falls and understands psychology better than any other human, and I don't usually stop to think about the logic of worlds. But this was too much for me. 

This nonsense is over 600 pages long, doesn't have a real ending, and doesn't really and seriously address the issue of climate change. Read it if you want, but you will also probably be disappointed. 3/5 stars

Lines of note:

Edith Wharton was born on the Square and later lived there. Herman Melville lived a block to the east and walked through the Square every day on his way to work on the docks of West Street, including during all of the six years when the Statue of Liberty's hand and torch stood there in the Square...One day he took his four-year-old granddaughter there to play in the park, sat down on a bench, and was looking at the torch so intently that he forget she was running around in the tulip beds and went back home without her. (Part II- C, timestamp 2:44:00)

Edith Wharton! Herman Melville! My ears perked at mentions of these two. Herman Melville's existence was a legitimate plot point of this book. Friends, we've come full circle. 

Things I looked up:

...like those tribes they thought were pygmies until the fed them properly in toddlerhood and turned out they were taller than the Dutch. (Part II - A, timestamp 2:15:23)

Probably this tribe?

The Woolworth building opened in 1913 and took the height crown away and after that the Met Life Tower became famous mostly for its four big clocks. (Part II - C, timestamp 2:39)

Woolworth Building

Met Life Tower

Hat mentions:

A thrust hat, stunning the prisoner. (Part III - E, timestamp 6:17:24)

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Would you want to live in a city that was underwater or would you try to move inland to drier areas? Are you worried about rising sea levels and coastal cities?